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Reader Comments (34)

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 9:57PM (Unverified) said

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world
of
warcraft

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 9:58PM (Unverified) said

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Yeah, I guess by that logic though, ANY current turn-based game that is capable of running on a low-end machine would make the list, since it wouldn't directly influence gameplay. Kind of an odd distinction to make.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 9:59PM (Unverified) said

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Geez my mom's PC is better then those test rigs. Part of PC gaming is having the latest and greatest technology and having to upgrade. They did leave out Counter Strike 1.6 and Quake 3 tons still play those and the system requirements are rock bottom.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 10:04PM (Unverified) said

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If you consider a Sempron 3300+ and a EVGA 6600 gt old, then I've been playing a lot of Prey and Far Cry lately.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 10:07PM Geirskogul said

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Abyss_Of_Borg

Read it again, they included CS1.6.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 10:10PM greatslack said

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I played WoW for a month and a half on a 3 year old HP laptop which only cost 1000 at the time, so as you can imagine, I rejoiced on the very few occasions when I got double digit framerates (and yes, I was playing at minimum possible settings). I don't know how I made it to 43.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 10:18PM (Unverified) said

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*cough*
Nethack!

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 10:20PM Guess Who said

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The Movies + Two year old budget Dell laptop + 256MB of RAM + integrated graphics = surprisingly good performance even on highest graphics setting.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 10:26PM (Unverified) said

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Tyrian. Quite possibly the best game ever.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 10:32PM (Unverified) said

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Nethack fried my graphics card. Whenever I boot it up, it's always a bunch of unintelligble characters on my screen.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 10:42PM (Unverified) said

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I played WOW on a cheap Dell desktop my parents purchest in around late 2000 early 2001, has a Pentium 3 in it I think. I did have to buy a new grafics card for it, but it was some NVidia that only set me back about $40 after a mail in rebate. The only problems I really ever experianced with it was some nasty slow down in the major cities, but other than that ot worked real well suprisingly.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 11:10PM Pal said

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Posted: Aug 14th 2006 11:10PM Foetoid said

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OMG LOL. They tested the games on hardware far above my own. I got a P3 933mhz with 512 sdram and a 256mb geforce fx5200 graphics card. People seem suprised to hear i have a 256mb graphics card on a pentium 3, and most scream "ITS IMPOSSIBLE".....ROFL. The hard part was finding a 256mb card that was agp 4x,6x,8x compatible, then presto. These games here wouldnt run easily on my pc. I mainly play Heroes 3 (can anyone please tell me that V is better than the atrocious IV), starcraft, counterstrike, total annihilation etc etc.

Posted: Aug 14th 2006 11:33PM (Unverified) said

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I've got a three year old Dell that can run Age of Empires III, Rise of Nations, Civ IV, and Pirates! extremely well. No complaints, it even runs Prey pretty well, although I have to bring down the settings a few notches.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 12:05AM (Unverified) said

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yeah Heroes V is pretty sweet Much harder campains (on hard or higher) then on Heroes 3, lots of bugs though.

Heroes 3 will play on any PC and the only slow parts are computer turns. Heroes 5 if you move the camera you could get into alot of trouble on an older machine.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 12:06AM mtsmylie said

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Fallout 1 & 2 and Planescape: Torment.

I could play those forever and ever and not get bored.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 12:09AM (Unverified) said

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DooM. 'Nuff said. :D

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 12:15AM SuiXide said

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On my laptop (Intel Celeron processor running at 1.7 ghz, ATi Mobility RADEON X300, 1 gig or RAM) I've been playing:

1.) The Movies (along with the Stunts and Effects expansion pack)
2.) Unreal Tournament 2004 (with low to medium settings)
3.) Lineage II (Some things like Shadows turned off)
4.) Maplestory (Simple game)
5.) Final Fantasy XI (Almost every setting turned up, as the game runs at 29 FPS no matter how high you turn everything up)
6.) Final Fantasy VII (Yes, the PC version)
7.) Halo PC and Halo: Custom Edition (Some settings turned off, but it's generally smooth)

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 12:27AM (Unverified) said

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worms armageddon? outrun 2006? unreal tournament 2004? the first is my all time favorite pc game and will run on anything; the latter two can be made to run just fine on the most junky of dx7 chipsets.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 12:37AM (Unverified) said

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You elitist PC jerks. The newest PC game I play is Red Alert 2. I still enjoy that sucker.

I never really saw the draw of constantly having to upgrade your hardware to get the most out of a game.. maybe that's just because I'm dirt poor.. but still. I dunno, never really seemed worth it to me. I'd rather buy a console for next to nothing (comparatively) and be done with the whole thing for another 4 or 5 years.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 1:43AM (Unverified) said

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Diablo II still goes hard - I still feel the urge to get it out, dust it off and revive my characters from the dead every 18 months or so and level them up a few more times.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 3:41AM (Unverified) said

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A good 3D engine is supposed to scale. If you turn down the graphics detail, most modern games work quite well on older hardware.

The big killer is main memory, though. Programmers do some brutal things to get every last bit of memory, like allocate twice as much as you actually have, to force the OS to swap everything possible to virtual memory. Then, they relase only enough memory so the game isn't using VM. That's why the hard drive gets tortured when the games exit. I wish developers let you fine-tune memory usage, given that they'll often let you toggle even the most basic of graphics options.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 3:46AM CaptainRon said

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Disciples 2 pwns Heroes V anyday.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 4:36AM (Unverified) said

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Marathon: Aleph One (i mostly play Marathon Infinity multiplayer)
It'll run on very very obsolete hardware.
It's like Halo, only more fun. Better storyline too. Bungie put so much marathon gameplay and storyline into Halo. It's almost like Halo 3 will bring them together... ?

Or just give us marathon 4 instead.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 6:26AM (Unverified) said

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The only bit of my rig that's a bit substandard is my graphics card - a GeForce 6200. That said, I've recently been playing Oblivion on it. I can only run it at 640x480 at about 20-30 fps, but it's still eminently playable.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 7:18AM (Unverified) said

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Minesweeper. Even when I max out settings, my 2 year old computer runs the game perfectly. Fraps shows a constant 3000fps.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 7:28AM (Unverified) said

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>[...] without hardcore hardware
Like my low end Athlon 64 3300+ with 1GB of RAM and a PCIe GeForce 6600? :sigh: It's so sad how quickly a system can become 'low end.'

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 8:10AM (Unverified) said

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I have been able to get Guild Wars running on a Radeon 7500. Not great mind you. But you can play it.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 8:28AM finitetoast said

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I still play Civilization II on an ancient laptop, and every now and then drag my SNES out to get some Super Metroid (Still the best metroid game ever) on. By which I mean "Play the whole game in less than three hours."

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 8:32AM Pete1210 said

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I've always upgraded my PC with year old parts and buy year old games (they're new to me) and save a ton of money that way. My PC config is Athlon 2400, 6600GT, 512MB RAM. Playing Far Cry, Max Payne2, UT2004 at high settings. BF2 at medium, but that game was so buggy I sold it.
I can play the newest games on the xbox 360 now, so my PC gaming is minimal. No plans to upgrade my current PC. But I will likely buy a new PC once Vista is out.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 9:30AM (Unverified) said

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I vote Diablo II as well. Addictive as hell and it will run on anything. Seriously, cram a wedge of cheese into your PCI slot and Diablo II will run. And once your computer overheats, you get Nachos!

Seriously though, I forgot about Marathon. I've gotta go get that.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 11:39AM Lord Minogue said

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And to think, I owned that IBM pc until two years ago. It had 416 kb of ram, a six color screen (orange, white, blue, green, red, black), ran on DOS, and the on/off switch was a giant red breaker switch on the back. The poor thing finally died and I upgraded to a 233mhz pentium II.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 12:38PM (Unverified) said

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I realized that Blizzard games have been the only games I come back to playing as the years go on...and these games have never been hardware intensive.

Heroes V on the other hand causes massive amounts of slowdown if you ever try to move the camera.

Posted: Aug 15th 2006 1:29PM (Unverified) said

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Freelancer runs on just about anything. And you can even start your own server or join another for free!

All of the Unreal Tournaments are flexible.

Not everyone has to play Oblivion... :P

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